ce of city
boarders. The second, "Love and Despatches," inculcates a double moral,
the usefulness of economy and the uselessness of mothers-in-law; and the
third, "The Cutter Wild Duck," is a shudderingly insipid composition
about a village lion who got drunk on his birthday, fell overboard, and
committed no end of follies. A later volume of "Little Tales" is,
indeed, so little as scarcely to have any excuse for being. The stories
have all more or less of a marine flavor; but the only one of them that
has a sufficient _motif_, rationally developed, is one entitled "How the
Pilot Got his Music-box." The novel, "A Supernumerary," is also a rather
weak performance, badly constructed, and overloaded with chaotic
incidents.

[25] Since this was written Drachmann has undergone a fresh
transformation, and is said to have returned to the radical camp.

_Voelund Smed_ (1895) is a cycle of spirited poems dealing with the
tragic fate of Weland the Smith, who took such a savage vengeance upon
the King for having maimed and crippled him. The legend is invested with
an obvious symbolic significance, and seems to have been intended as a
poetic declaration of independence--a revolutionary manifesto
signalizing the Drachmann's re-espousal of the radical opinions of his
youth, in his allegiance to which he had, perhaps, out of regard for
worldly advantages been inclined to waver.

GEORG BRANDES

It is a greater achievement in a critic to gain an international fame
than in a poet or a writer of fiction. The world is always more ready to
be amused than to be instructed, and the literary purveyor of amusement
has opportunities for fame ten times greater than those which fall to
the lot of the literary instructor. The epic delight--the delight in
fable and story--to which the former appeals, is a fundamental trait in
human nature; it appears full grown in the child, and has small need of
cultivation. But the faculty of generalization to which the critic
appeals is indicative of a stage of intellectual development to which
only a small minority even of our so-called cultivated public attains.
It is therefore a minority of a minority which he addresses, the
intellectual _elite_ which does the world's thinking. To impress these
is far more difficult than to impress the multitude; for they are
already surfeited with good writing, and are apt to reject with a
shoulder-shrug whatever does not coincide with their own tenor of
t